Yesterday, the wonderful Tatyana Bakhmetyeva invited me to speak to her “Feminism in a Multicultural World” class at the University of Rochester. We discussed my article “White Feminists/Black Blobs” and Lila Abu-Lughod’s “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?” among other texts.
It’s always a pleasure to talk to bright young women but this class was doubly important to me on account of the many points I wanted to raise.
We talked about imperial feminism and its problematic roots in colonial history, the gendered polarity between a masculine West and a feminine East, veiling and unveiling as anchored to the same point of reference i.e. male pleasure, Kristof’s Half the Sky and its cringeworthy white savior approach, the implications of the male gaze as well as the white feminist gaze and how they both objectify the other and police public spaces, the inapplicability of “non-mixité” when it comes to Black women (Audre Lorde), Muslim women (Houria Bouteldja) and Dalit women (Anu Ramdas), the main thesis of J M Blaut’s “1492: The Debate on Colonialism, Eurocentrism, and History,” the military and financial tyrannical structures that continue to maintain world inequities, and much much more. As a way to round off the discussion, I suggested Huma Dar’s “Women and the ‘War on/of Terror’ or “Looking for Osama and Finding Mukhtaran,” a talk about how the West’s desire to save Muslim Women is used as a pretext for the war on terror.
All in all a very productive day until I ran into the following headline: France’s minister for women’s rights has compared Muslim women who wear the veil to American “Negroes” who accepted slavery, in an interview with French media. Seriously? Laurence Rossignol needs to go back to school and get some basic education.